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New Harder-to-Counterfeit Iraqi Police Uniforms

In an effort to deal with the problem of imposters in fake uniforms, Iraqi policemen now have a new uniform:

Police Colonel Abdul-Munim Jassim explained why the new uniform would be difficult for criminals to fake.

"The Americans take a photo of the policeman together with the number of the uniform. If found elsewhere, it will immediately be recognised as stolen," he said.

Bolani promised tough measures against anyone caught counterfeiting or trading in the uniforms and praised his officers, telling them their work had begun to turn back the tide of violence around Iraq.

I'm sure these things help, but I don't see what kind of difference it will make to a normal citizen faced with someone in a police uniform breaking down his door at night. Or when gunmen dressed in police uniforms execute the brother of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.

Comments

This plan might help detect infiltration into police armories and equipment storage areas being quietly raided for arms, equipment, and intelligence, but even that's a stretch. Ordinarily, at any 'cop shop' no cops will challenge the identity of anyone who looks like a cop.

In the changeover period, some cops will have the new uniforms, and some the old, so the plan does not begin to take effect until new uniforms vastly outnumber the old.

I doubt the scheme will have any impact on the hit squads. Real cops do not show ID. Their confident dominant attitude suffices to identifiy them. The trouble is, a hit squad will have that same attitude.

Where the scheme fails the worst is in making it impossible for citizens, or police, to distinguish the police from the assassins when they're in plainclothes.

I think the uniform change is just to pretend the government is doing something.

Doesn't sound much like anti-counterfeiting at all, but rather a way to identify stolen uniforms.

Which brings up an interesting question--how do you stop counterfeit uniforms? As I see it, the requirements are:

1) Must be cost-effective to manufacture
2) The measures must be easy to see under various lighting conditions
3) Can't interfere with special requirements of the uniforms (armor, camoflage, etc.)

The second one is the hardest, I think. You can't use the subtle measures used on currency, like very fine details in the pictures, since you couldn't see them unless you're up close under good light. Doing this under very dark conditions may be impossible, but you should be able to see the measures under low-light, at least.

most of the iraqi cops are shiites looking for payback for what the sunnis did to them during the saddam era. what difference do their uniforms make? this is most likely an attempt by the government to mischaracterize the problem as officer impersonation.

WASHINGTON, DC—In a carefully phrased, 128-bit encoded announcement that has challenged U.S. security agency procedures, top officials of the National Cryptography and Information Security Council warned that "FrpX-K5jE-Oc4n-e5Dn" if "Ha4d-87gH-uiH3-gB5r-g8Bh" late Monday.

Does it matter just how difficult or easy the uniforms are to manufacture / counterfit, the simple fact is that people in (any) uniform are treated differently by civilians to those who are not wearing uniforms.

A uniform wearer will usually be shown defrence to by civilians for the first few moments of any interaction between them.

After that it does not matter if they can identify the uniforms as fake or not, the uniformed person is to close to the civilian for them to do anything about it.

When it comes to criminals the situation is usualy reversed, anybody wearing a uniform no matter how insignificant a risk (think postman for instance) is effectivly a marked person to avoid / attack.

If you go out into the streets in most countries of the world the average citizan could not describe a police uniform with any accuracy.

So I suspect the design of the uniforms is at best a moot point irrespective of any extra security features they might have designed in.

The seam in jeans also has a stone washed fabric pattern that can identify where jeans are bought from. Something featured on Americas most wanted about a decade ago. Each individual wearing jeans has a unique pattern and this can be analysed with specific forensic software. Perhaps it's best to wear a suit when robbing your next bank.

Did they suddenly stop arresting children who transport gasoline and attempt to sell it at a higher price than the puppet government deems necessary?

Or is violating persons in the name of upholding the various price controls not considered a crime by the statists who frequent this forum?

The uniforms are a tactic to quell the population into submitting to their authority, and not anyone else's. It is a simple way of saying: don't kill or maim me, because I've got a whole big posse that will come back for revenge.

I think Dom may have nailed it. It's hard to see how this tactic will prevent people from impersonating cops... but it might let somebody who just watched their uncle get dragged into the street and shot identify who did it.

If that really is the goal, it changes the kinds of security problems you need to worry about. Counterfeiting the uniform is still a risk (since you could frame someone), but you also need the uniform to be tamper-proof in some way so that it is difficult for someone wearing the uniform to hide their number.

Making a uniform tamper-proof would be a bit tricky, but what if someone did figure out how to do it? Would the death squads just stop wearing uniforms? Or would they make sure there are never any witnesses?

This doesn't solve anything:
- the uniforms have to be manufactured somewhere, so they can be stolen there
- the uniforms can be taken from bodies of killed officers
- the uniforms can be copied (they just have to be good enough for the initial impression)
And we have other uniforms: medics, soldiers, postal workers.....

I don't know enough about the manufacturing process for clothing and uniforms but I suspect the "digital camouflage pattern" needs somewhat special equipment to manufacture. It can still be cost effective on the large scale but individual groups won't have the resources to make large numbers of convincing fake uniforms.

As for the numbers if they make them big enough so that they can't be obscured without it being really obvious.

The first measure means that if you see someone wearing a police uniform there's a very high probability that person is a police officer.

The second measure means that if an officer is obscuring their number they are very likely up to no good (and you can report it, anonymously of course). Of course if they do something naughty with their number showing it's easy to report them.

Of course uniforms can still be stolen which nullifies both security measures but if done properly the number of stolen uniforms can be kept fairly small.

Of course the aim of all this is to stop the bad guys from doing bad things while wearing police uniforms. If it actually works they just might be able to have a local security force that the public more-or-less trusts.

For any of you that are actually in Iraq (not many I suspect), you would probably agree the uniform of the IPs is a silly little matter compared with the many other issues of much greater importance in this country.

"Peterson also paid tribute to the 4,000 officers who have been killed in the past two years."

Yup, a great big serial number is exactly what I'd want if I were a cop (dirty or not) in Iraq right now.

The result will be either mediorcity (who wants to stand out and be identifiable and risk having one side or the other kill you) or non-compliance (IIRC even cops in Oz have been known to cover their badge numbers when breaking up protests).

the first thing i thougt of was not how civilians could identify imposters with fake uniforms, but how other policemen - or officials - could identify imposters with real (stolen or sold) ones. if this problem was solved, the one of fake uniforms would be too.

a police officer doesn't know every other one, moreover i assume there is no working network to compare global data, e.g. over the internet. so, if a random police officer has to be identified by another one who doesn't know him personally, without any network connection - is there a way to examine if the uniform really belongs to the person wearing it, provided there is the technical equipment available (if no special equipment is required, it would work for civilians too). there also can't be too much shared information around that has to be updated frequently (like checksums of every officer).

maybe i don't get the obvious here, but my first bet was on asymmetric encryption. there has to be information that could not be given to or taken by any imposter - secret codes or personal information (birthdaye, social security number) do not work, because they could be freely shared (for money) or stolen (by torture).

what about a picture of the police officer? unencryptet (printed) it makes no sense, because it could be faked easily. but a picture (and various visible and checkable information like tattoos) could be encrypted with a secret key at the factory, then the resulting string would printed on the uniform as, say, a barcode, and encrypted with the public key. a successfull decryption would show an image of the police officer the uniform was made for.

but of course, thats way too complicated. it would require lots of hardware, identifying would probably take to long and you can't store the contents of a whole picture on a barcode. the last one is not a problem - it could be stored on an id-card too.
not really a solution that depends on instantly recognizeable uniforms, and it certainly doesn't help the civilians.

but simply printing the picture on the uniform directly would make it easy to fake. even worse, if people were to believe in this insecure method, they are more at risk because they'd probably trust an imposter more than without bad identification.

so there had to be a way to make the pictures tamperproof without (public/private key) technology involved. i think, the one who finds an easy (meaning without doing the decryption in your head :) solution to this would be rich beyond imagination.

but! what, if the use of technology would be allowed? lets say, mms (multimedia message service) enabled cellphones?

then it could work this way: the officers uniform has a big unique code (4 alphanumeric chars are enough for about 1,5 million cops) on it, that is recognizeable from the distance or through peepholes. the user sends an sms with it to a public service number, and recieves an image of the assigned officer.

this method has its drawbacks: people need cellphones, a working signal, and the service had to be free. moreover it takes time, so it could hardly be done in stressfull situations (eg. shootings). additionally, if an imposter visually resemples the cop the uniform was stolen from ...

but at least, if you have to decide to let a potential impostor wearing an uniform into your flat or not, this could help.

If I understand this is only made to protect against the fact that old uniforms are easily found in the black market. Kind of the same thing one country does when making new coins.

So it basically puts the pressure on bad guys to find new ways of getting new uniforms / counterfeiting thems.

They either have to have more money, or make new operations that will expose them.

It's war by the finances and give the goog guys a lead time of some months or years before the situation is back to what it is now (if the political side doesn't improve).

With a rate of 20 cops killed per week, bad guys will have enough uniforms in 6 months to be operational. That 20 dead cops/ week rate may lower if counterfeited uniforms was the reason for these killings.

1, Will it stop cops getting killed = NO
2, Will it sop civilians getting killed = NO
3, will it increase the liklyhood of a cop getting killed = PROBABLY
4, Will it decrease the number of bad cops = PROBABLY NOT
5, Will it decrease the number of civilians killed by people diguiesed as cops = PROBABLY NOT

6, Will it look politicaly good in the press etc = YES

Unless anybody can come up with an other question with a convincing YES answer under all circumstances then,

I guess my above questions supply the real answer of why they are bothering to do it....

As a morale booster and "look busy" step, perhaps. As a security measure, it's not clear yet which direction, but it seems unlikely that putting a number and new pattern on a police uniform will help prevent a civil war. Sorry, I mean sectarian violence.

If they make the new uniforms bullet prove it make sense, but I don’t expect that. So I think that there is no real advance in getting new uniforms. They will be counterfeited in a very short time and after that time nothing better as the current ones.